Thursday, December 1, 2016

Only
someone, very wise in the ways of the world, could have crafted such
an action. Nor is there any need to guess at where this action will
take the world, but Putin is jockeying to become a world leader and
he's well on his way to accomplishing that task. Read on:

The
utility of war and warfare has a long history, steeped, as it were in
deception, intrigue and economics. For those who have read the
classics you know that at the root of all wars is resources. Tribes
held productive lands while nomads wandered from place to place. As
these wanders grew in numbers, and as settled people prospered, the
wanders, seeking to survive, decided that it was better to die in
battle than to simply sit patiently and starve to death. So, first
they drove hunter gatherers from productive sections of jungle, then
gouged themselves on the fruits of their conquests.

The
trouble was, they were not as good at husbanding their newly
acquired lands as the former settlers had been. Why should they be
any good at caring for the land? They were wanders, when the land
they were on gave out, they simply picked up and sought another
battle for the resources they needed.

Then
came the farmers. With care, and labor they tended their crops and
were able to raise more than sufficient produce for themselves and so
there was something to trade. Trade allowed people to leave the land
and pursue other ideas about creating resources. For example potters
and masons. It was no longer necessary to have everyone working at
farming and tending animals. But raiders came to take away the
farmers production as well as any resources, gold, copper, silver
etc., that the non-farmers had earned.

After
a while the farmers realized they needed an army to protect their
stores and so gov't was born. With gov't came leadership and power
in the hands of a few. At first the duties of gov't were rudimentary,
simply to protect from invaders and collect taxes, which were gov't's
principal source of income. Then they expanded their powers to settle
disputes and regulate trade and finally as they became more
sophisticated, they began bestowing and removing rights. As a
societies ultimate weapon, gov't came to hold the power of life and
death over each and every citizen. As the system of governance
became more complex, with the growth of the population and trade, a
forum of associates, known by various titles, was devised to share
these immense powers.

In
the course of governing, the immense power of leadership allowed for
the public treasuries to be either handled in a proper fashion, or
squandered uselessly as the prowess (or lack thereof) of successive
leadership provided.

As
you can easily see from this “quick and dirty” narrative, the
problems faced by governments was the selection of leaders and the
matter of ruling by law. In the first instance, the means of
succession of leadership was often decided by matter of birthright,
this did not work so well as Caligula's two year reign of terror
reveals. Still this method continued to be widely used. More modern
governments use various voting schemes. These tend to fail because
the population of voters isn't fully apprised of what constitutes
good leadership.

Those
who would be “king” realize that people are attracted to “strong”
leaders, thus they hold themselves out to be “strong” by posing
in a dictatorial fashion, rather than having some operational plan.
At times campaigning for votes becomes more like some sort of movie
script or tv commercial, than an actual appeal to be the next
leader.

Look
at Rome 1000 CE (or AD if you prefer), they had waterwheels and even
hydro-dynamically driven piston motors. Now can you imagine what Rome
could have become had they invested in that technology? So, the
question is “why didn't they?” The answer is: Slavery! Because
they had slaves to do the manual labor, they had no need of labor
saving devices. Because they had not deemed it wise or prudent to
educate the citizenry, there was no effort engaged to take technology
to the next step. Slavery held them back, away from a future that
would have been more prosperous than anything they could have
imagined. That should be a lesson for every nation on earth, but
sadly no, it isn't.

The
use of steam engines would have been advanced almost a thousand years
earlier. They had the metal, they had the means, the early start
would have been troublesome without stainless steel to resist
corrosion, but they also had glass which might have been used as a
coating. Who knows how fast technology would have produced needed
solutions. We do know, however, how much a water or steam driven
mill can produce. But then, here we are, almost one thousand years
of wasted effort, because leaders and public valued “strong” over
“smart”.

Today
we live in a world that is much more technologically advanced. So
much so, in fact, that without our technology a good portion of the
worlds population could not survive. Meaning that today, we are more
dependent on smart than we ever were on “strong”. Terrorism?
The Romans suffered it too. Why you ask? Well, because they
wouldn't let people outside come inside and join in their prosperous
society. They pressed invidious distinctions to keep “outsiders”
out and it became their down fall.

Their
own prosperity had weakened them to the point where they could no
longer raise armies, they fell to hiring mercenaries. Mercenaries
are loyal only to those who pay their salaries. Who pays the most,
or offers the most, gets their support. When Rome fell under siege
they could no longer trade, they could no longer pay and they were
starved into submission by a horde with no education at all, just an
ability to kill more and quicker than anyone else. Nature abhors a
vacuum, to be of greatest use, education must flow to the masses or
be rendered useless. If people cannot understand the intricacies of
the systems that support the social/economic structure they survive
by, they'll senselessly trash it without a care, only to face the
consequences later. And “later” does nobody any good.

Which
brings us back to today. Today where the Bush administration wildly
sold the nation on the futile utility of war, in an effort to appear
to be strong, he squandered both human and economic resources and
gave the world reason to pause and reflect on US leadership. One
doesn't lead by going around kicking people in the head. One leads
by convincing others that their plans are good and/or better than
what has gone before. In that light, the PNAC seems so outrageously
silly, it appears to have more likely been crafted in an insane
asylum than in some lofty “think tank”, by people of high
caliber. The notion that one can stop terrorist attacks from
occurring by the willful and wanton, randomized killing and
displacement of millions of people, is something for psychiatrist
and mental health professionals to behold. For example, the PNAC
hadn't a clue that the oil they intended should pay the costs of the
war, was already under contract to US oil companies. Thus, we wound
up, in effect, taking possession of oil we had already brought and
paid for. Worse, our European allies also had contracts for that
oil, which, it turns out had to be honored as well. So “Mr and Mrs
“PNAC” no war spoils oil for you! It should not have taken a
genius to figure that out, long before the first shot was fired.

So
here we have Donald J. Trump, planning to write some invidious
distinctions into law. Yet another simplistic solution to a problem
that, in reality doesn't exist, except in the minds of “supremacists”
who seem to believe that, no matter your schooling or intelligence
level, no matter your commitment to hard work, somehow the color of
ones skin or their state of origin somehow makes them better suited
to enjoy life, liberty and the right to peacefully pursue happiness.
Go figure.

The
gravest danger to the republic is that, like nations of old, a
leader, untutored in governing will make an ungovernable mess of
things. Putting into high office, officials whose main calling is
some ideological bend, rather than people with a good grasp of the
paradigms in operation therein, we get mangled decisions that either
require constant correction, or that block the deployment of critical
resources to fix problems while they're still small enough to be
fixed. Try to imagine what a Clarence Thomas or an Antonin Scalia
would have been at The First Continental Congress. At a time when a
word here, a phrase there could have altered the course of U.S.
History for the millions of people we have today.

But
no, I won't say what Putin's masterful stroke was, if you didn't
get it, don't worry you will eventually. I just don't want it's
effect to be minimized by premature attention. It's already made the
news once, fear not, it will again.